Representing Security: A Popular Criminology of Private Policing in Film

Abstract

Film analysis in criminology and criminal justice studies has flourished over the past two decades. Groundbreaking work by Rafter (Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society, 2nd edn. New York: Oxford, 2006) delineated the subject matter and set out new conceptual and theoretical approaches. Importantly, Rafter (Theoretical Criminology, 11(3): 403–420, 2007) and Rafter and Brown (Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2011) called for the development of a popular criminology that takes up film and other popular culture as efforts to understand crime and justice that can be read alongside academic discourses (see, e.g., Kohm and Greenhill, Theoretical Criminology, 15(2): 195–215, 2011; Kohm, Popular Criminology, in Rafter, Nicole and Eamonn Carrabine, eds. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Crime, Media, and Popular Culture, 2017). Since this time, film analyses in criminology and criminal justice studies have generally followed the normative organization of the discipline, examining criminal etiology and the institutions of the public criminal justice system: police, criminal law and corrections. However, there is a dearth of criminological scholarship on films that explore private security (for a notable exception, see Walby and Lippert, Security Journal, 30(4): 1134–1150, 2017). Rafter (Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society, 2nd edn. New York: Oxford, 2006) argues that crime films are ideological in the way they represent ideas about social life both in content and in the gaps between reality and cinematic representation. This chapter is an effort to expose some of these gaps in films about private security. Like early twentieth century cop films prior to concerted efforts to professionalize policing in America, most contemporary films about private security treat their subjects with irreverence or as unidimensional players in the criminal justice apparatus despite the exponential growth of private security and its penetration into nearly all areas of the justice system. Using Rafter’s (Theoretical Criminology, 11(3): 403–420, 2007) popular criminology framework, this chapter examines the way private security is represented in Anglo-North American films since the 1980s in order to explicate the ideological framing of security more broadly within late modern criminal justice. I also analyze several international films that suggest the emergence of an alternative film tradition that takes up critical issues in private security such as colonialism, corruption, and surveillance. I demonstrate that films are an important and underutilized resource for critically analyzing the shifting cultural significance of private security in contemporary times.